Age Gets Involved

My dad died at 89 with Alzheimer's Disease. My dad was brilliant and still came up with brilliant sayings after the dementia took hold of his mind. One of the things he said was that, "Age gets involved." I thought that was such a perfect way to express it. I was in my 60s at the time, and he also commented that I was "an old guy." So, two brilliant observations in my opinion, offered from someone who was supposedly demented. Anyway, yes and yes to both of those opinions. Both of those opinions counter the trite and oft-repeated phrase, "Age is just a number." No, it is not. Another useless and oft-repeated phrase guarantees that, "Age is a matter of mind over matter; if you don't mind, it doesn't matter." Again, I say, trite and useless phrases such as these should be thought through a little better, but that is just my possibly useless but not oft-repeated phrase. I just survived another birthday, and who knows how many more I will or will not survive? Only God. God knows, so I am trying to be as concise and purposeful in my communication as I can with whatever time I have left. People in their 70s die all the time, every day, I'm sure. At least the famous ones you read about on Facebook, but they, of course, are not the only people referenced in those stats. In an effort to be scientific I googled "how many people die in their 70s every day?" Here is the conclusion of the AI Overview: "To estimate the daily number, you can divide the annual rate by 365. This results in a daily average of approximately \(1,764.6\div 365\approx 4.8\) deaths per day per 100,000 people in that age range." That doesn't sound so bad. I would say that it seems our society is very interested in age. I am judging from my own experience, of course. The older you get, the more it seems that way. In my particular life, I would estimate that I get at least one request from a child between grades, say, two and six to tell my age. I even had one second grader say to me, "Aren't you getting a little old for this job?" Other kids ask me if I'm a grandmother (I am not). I notice that being in one's 60s is supposed to be old if you're in your 20s or 30s. I suppose that was considered old when I was in my 20s or 30s. The Beatles, you remember, sang about "Will you still love me when I'm 64?" and, of course, they have aged past that mark and no one is thinking of them as old, so there you go. The most recent conversation I had with a kid about age was yesterday, because all the kids knew it was my birthday. You see, I don't even want to tell you my age. Why? Because it feels like it invokes a whole slew of preconceptions. Anyway, first I asked him why he wanted to know. He's asked me before, for one thing, and I told him, and he said his grandpa was that age. Then I felt impressed to tell him the following: You know, no matter how old you get, you just look old, but you don't necessarily feel old. You still feel the same inside. You are still you. You still feel just like you did when you were 30 or 20 or 16, and this is true. Obviously, you look at a lot of things differently, but you don't feel the same way you may look to others. And I think this was somewhat of a revelation for this young boy. In graduate school, I learned that age is a time when part of your role is to teach younger people how to age. I take that as a kind of cool project. There is actually a lot that could be said about that, but I'm not going to go into a ton of it at this moment, because I now need to get ready to meet some friends for a late lunch/early dinner, but it is a very interesting topic. "Age gets involved," he said. You get aches and pains. You deal with it. You want to stay flexible, agile, in good shape, you have to work at it. There are ways. You want to stay alert and curious, stay alert and curious. You want your brain to keep producing synapses, keep learning new things. You get tired, take a nap, or don't take a nap, take care of yourself, love others, connect with God, don't give up on life. That's all I have time for today. Yes, age is not just a number, how can you not mind aches and pains, lost opportunities, losses of friends, etc. You can't "not mind" things that matter, okay? Yes, age gets involved. That's all, it's not to say life has to stop being wonderful. That is your decision and yours alone. I'll check back tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving! Rejoice and be thankful. Love, Carolyn